An expedition to the mechanism of plant-microbe interaction by utilization of different molecular biology tools

Abstract

The global demand for food, animal feed, and plant-based products is increasing with the blast of population growth putting unprecedented pressure to the agriculture as the natural resources become diminished and the conventional system of cultivation is not sufficient to cope up with this. In addition to this, recent public concerns to the catastrophic effect of chemical fertilizer and pesticides to the livestocks and the environment led to the urgency of adopting sustainable agricultural practices. In sustainable agriculture, the plant-microbe interaction plays an imperative position which mainly confers the mechanism and utilization of beneficial microbes and their products for crop improvement, providing abiotic stress tolerance and control of plant diseases. The interaction between plants and microbes is a very complex and dynamic biological process which has evolved due to thousand years of coevolution between them. The plant-microbe interactions can provide the new imminent in various aspects of the mechanisms of how the microbes respond to perturbation, how chemical exudates released from plant roots, and how do they affect plant health and development. In the last two decades, molecular biology is being a powerful and precise tool becoming more commonly adopted and reliable for understanding of the plant-microbe interaction. For example, the introduction of next-generation sequencing giving multitude of nucleotide data in a very short duration also assists metagenomics which allows studying complete microbiota including non-culturable microbes. This book chapter is intended to chronicle the development of different molecular biology tools in studying the biosynthetic pathway secondary metabolites produced by microbes, diversity of microorganisms, and functional identification of induced genes in a plant-microbe interaction.